BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE

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Transcribed version of the text

French

The Architecture harmonique is the first treatise entirely devoted to the links between music and architecture and the first one written by a musician on that subject. When the work appeared, its author, René Ouvrard, was acting as maître de musique at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. He was born in Chinon on June 16, 1624, and traveled to Italy in 1655. The details surrounding his trip remain unclear (we do not know the name of his patron). His career began when he returned. He was choirmaster at the cathedral in Bordeaux in 1657, and maître de musique at the cathedral in Narbonne in 1659. In 1662 he became maître de musique at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris and remained there for 17 years. His correspondance with Claude Nicaise (BnF, Ms. fonds fr. 9360), an abbot in Dijon, points out his intense musical activity and emphasizes his preference for the Italian style; none of his compositions, motets or an opera, however, have come down to us. His first theoretical work, a treatise on musical composition displays a clear preference for combinatorial art (Secret pour composer en musique, 1658). Starting in 1668, Ouvrard published at the same time texts on mathematics (L’art et la science des nombres, 1677) and on theology (Studiosis sanctorum scripturarum biblia sacra, 1668; Motifs de réunion à l’église catholique, 1668; Défense des anciennes traditions de l’église de France, 1678) which reveal that he was close to Port-Royal and Antoine Arnaud. In spite of Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s protection, his Jansenist sympathies forced him to leave Paris in 1679. He withdrew to Tours where he had held a canonry since 1668. Then he devoted himself to writing the book he considered his major work, for which he had obtained a privilege that same year, 1668: La musique rétablie depuis ses origines (Tours, Bibliothèque municipale, Mss. 821-822), a vast bilingual project in Latin and French, combining everything that had been said, written and done on music. This work was unfinished when Ouvrard died on July 19, 1694. Architecture does not appear to be among his immediate interests, unless through the language of proportions; the Architecture harmonique was to include the Traité particulier des proportion..., an addition to his Musique rétablie.
His correspondence enlightens us on the genesis of the treatise. Colbert had asked him to teach “something” to his son Jules-Armand, surintendant des bâtiments (a letter dated December 2, 1678, Paris). In the dedicating epistle, addressed to Colbert senior, which begins the Architecture harmonique, Ouvrard defines his role and procedure from the outset: “Whether it is the restoration of an ancient doctrine rather than the invention of a new one, I have no fear to say that it is preferable to many other inventions, and that when his Majesty offered a prize for the one who would invent a new architectural order, He was asking for less than what I bring today to perfect that fine art, since without the doctrine of the harmonic proportions, all the architectural orders are no more than a messy heap of disordered and shapeless stones. The Ancients had it and worked according to its principles alone, as I show through the measurements of the Temple of Solomon, the only antique edifice of which we have a full description. The Greeks laid the foundations for it, the Romans sought it; the Moderns speak about it without putting it in practice, and it is nothing more than chance that we recognize it in public buildings” (pp. 2-3). It is all there: the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, the Louvre affair, the competition in 1671 to create a sixth architectural order, the French national order, and the reference to “chance”, a concept close to “fantasy” according to Claude Perrault, the author of an annotated translation of Vitruvius’ De Architectura (1673) and an Abrégé (1674) in which he questions the cornerstones of architectural beauty. In that respect, the Architecture harmonique participated in the discussions triggered by the recently created Royal Academy of Architecture concerning the creation of a French architectural language independent of the antique model as well as by the reference to modern Italy.
Ouvrard’s proposal is clear: “We claim that there is a similar analogy between the proportions of music and those of architecture, that what shocks the ear in the former, hurts the eye in the latter and that a building cannot be perfect unless it follows the same rules as those of composition and combination of musical chords” (pp. 5-6). The mathematical and philosophical foundation of musical science, a heritage of the Quadrivium based on the Pythagorean-Platonic doctrine of sonic numbers is the common ground allowing the analogy between musical and architectural proportions. To that end Ouvrard proceeds with an update of the theoretical paradigm. Aware that the relationship established by the first 4 numbers making up the Pythagorean tetraktys (1: 2 = diapason, the interval of an octave; 2: 3 = diapente, a fifth; 3: 4 = diatessaron, a fourth), was no longer enough to explain architectural proportionality, he puts to good use Gioseffo Zarlino’s senario, which expands the series up to 6, in order to include among the harmonious chords some intervals used in practice but whose ratio was still considered dissonant, in this case 4: 5, a major third; 5: 6, a minor third; 3: 5, a major sixth; 5: 8, a minor sixth (G. Zarlino, Dimostrazioni armoniche, 1558). The process had two important consequences. First and foremost, the relationships which were not considered harmonious suddenly became so. Therefore one was legitimately able to find inside De Architectura more harmonic relationships than one could reasonably expect to find. This is what Ouvrard applied himself to proving in the second part of his Architecture harmonique, with many examples carefully taken from the Vitruvian text. Secondly, Ouvrard defines the harmonies resulting from the relationships as “harmony”, and names the intervals, not with the Greek nomenclature, speculative, of diapason, diapente, diatessaron, but with the names of the notes do, re, mi, fa, sol, la. Nor was he overburdened with a factual outcome: the re, fa, la triad can be transposed to the lower level do, mi, sol for the simple reason that the major triad is more pleasant to hear than the minor one. The stakes were high: Ouvrard was going from a universal measure of immanent essence (diapason, diapente, diatessaron designate an ideal domaine) to the state of contingent epiphenomenon, in this case real sounds produced by the instrument, in this case “architectural”. The buildings described in the Architecture harmonique are in fact immense resonators whose mechanism today recalls that of the Vitruvian amplifying vases as well as the machinae phonurgicæ of Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher (Musurgia universalis, 1650). The prototype, Biblical and at the same time classical (in the reading of it made by another Jesuit erudite, Juan Bautista Villalpando, In Ezechielem explanationes, 1595-1604), is the Temple of Solomon, which “was shaken and made a pleasant hum and quivering”, because of its dimensions “tuned” to the pitch of the trumpets and other instruments played during religious ceremonies. As proof, Ouvrard gives the example of the pillar of the arch in the cathedral of Tours, “which trembles visibly and moves more than a half-foot at the sound of a particular bell, and remains immobile at the sound of all the others, although they are closer to it and larger than the one that makes it tremble”. (p. 13). Heir to the spirit of the Renaissance, Ouvrard thus tries to preserve faith in universal harmony and to confirm the ontological validity of the numerus with experimental demonstrations. But his attempt was destined to fail; the empericist method to which he laid claim invalidated his approach.
The work was not received whole-heartedly. François Blondel took it over in the Cours d’architecture (Cinquième partie, 1683, pp. 756-760), without giving it complete credence (“this doctrine is not capable, as he says, of entirely reestablishing fine architecture, and of forming invariable rules for it”, p. 760), whereas Claude Perrault, in his Ordonnance des cinq espèce des colonnes(1683), criticized the musical analogy and the “mystery of the proportions”, without ever naming Ouvrard (personal reasons probably had something to do with it; as the correspondance shows, the two men knew and disliked each other). The Academy of Architecture read out Ouvrard’s text during three meetings, on October 1st, 16th, and 23rd, 1690, and arrived at the conclusion “that there are several antique buildings, among those that have been considered, in which the arrangement does not precisely agree with this harmonic proportion”. Then the treatise was forgotten. Christiaan Huygens characterized the Architecture harmonique as “an extravagant little treatise” (a letter to Leibniz, July 1692). In the following century, in 1725, Sébastien de Brossard deplored the loss of that “very curious dissertation”, untraceable for thiry-five years.
If Ouvrard’s text did disappear in the mist of time, until a recent resurrection, its proposal of an analogy founded mathematically between music and architecture, although fantastical, has survived. The memory of it, diverted, was in fact assured by Blondel’s summary in Cours d’architecture, and especially by the follow-up that the latter gave to it. Blondel formulated a musical analysis of the Attic base whose constituitive parts form a triad in the plagal mode (Phrygian, Lydian and Æolian) and pushes his reasoning so far as to relate the fillets accompanying the scotia to notes fuses and semi-fuses “which by their modulation cause the essential notes of the chord to be appreciated with more sweetness” (p. 759). All of which represents a betrayal of Ouvrard’s proposal, which overlooks not only the orders, but above all their ornaments. However, Blondel’s follow-up assured its posterity; the example of the Attic base was taken up by Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières (Génie de l’architecture, 1780), and by the representatives of the Italian school established by Antoine Deriset: Tommaso Temanza, Francesco Ottavio Magnocavalli, Bernardo Antonio Vittone (who transformed Blondel’s chords into a “cantilena di canto fermo”, that is, into a Gregorian melody (Istruzioni elementari, 1760, p. 367), Berardo Galiani, Girolamo Masi, Baldassare Orsini et Angelo Comolli. Again in the 19th century the Attic base acted as a model to make a case for and explain the analogy existing between music and architecture (De Bioul, L’Architecture de Vitruve, 1816). In any case none of these authors had the possibility of reading the original source, which nevertheless did not prevent them from imagining its content. Then followed the example of Rudolf Wittkower, who although confirming that he had not been able to consult the work, drew erroneous conclusions from the title (Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 1949).
Therefore the Architecture harmonique is a fundamental text needed to understand the role and the destiny of musical analogy within architectural treatises, and clarifies the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns in a new way. The notion of “parallel”, taken up at the end of the 17th century by Charles Perrault to describe the cultural crisis of the Grand Siècle (Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes, 1688-1697), had already been introduced as early as 1640 by Roland Fréart de Chambray in a treatise, Parallèle de l’architecture antique avec la moderne (1650) from which Ouvrard took up the main propositions point by point. Therefore it is in the light of the architectural domain that the literary field can be explained, as much from a chronological point of view (the quarrel in architecture was exhausting its driving force when the literary field was about to experience its first controversy) as a theoretical one: establishing a national architectural language goes through the inclusion- or the rejection- of the mathematical (harmonic) foundation of the status of the proportions. Finally, this text appeared at the same time as the birth of esthetic language, by offering a privileged point of view in order to uderstand the modification of the semantic field associated with the notion of “music”, from an ontological to a metaphorical expression. A unique work, the Architecture harmonique thus invites one to wonder about the weight of historiographic traditions and to reconsider certain historical notions reputedly established.

Vasco Zara – 2018
(UMR “ARTeHIS” 6298, Dijon / Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours)

Critical bibliography

M. Costantini, “La trasformazione storica dell’applicazione dei rapporti musicali all’architettura attraverso la lettura armonica della base attica”, Archivio Storico AMMA – Le culture della tecnica, ns. 14, 2002, pp. 75-102.

F. Fichet, La théorie architecturale à l’âge classique. Essai d’anthologie critique, Liège, Mardaga, 1979.

G. Hersey, Architecture and Geometry in the Age of Baroque, Chicago-London, The University of Chicago Press, 2000.

M.-P. Martin, “L’analogie des proportions architecturales et musicales: évolution d’une stratégie”, D. Rabreau & D. Massounie (eds.), Claude Nicolas Ledoux et le livre d’architecture en français – Etienne Louis Boullée l’utopie et la poésie de l’art, Paris, Monum, 2006, pp. 40-47.

M. Moserle, “René Ouvrard: ‘Architecture harmonique’ ”, F. Amendolagine (ed.), Le architetture di Orfeo. Musica e architettura tra Cinquecento e Settecento, Lugano-Milan, Giampiero Casagrande editore, 2011, pp. 63-115.

Y. Pauwels, “ ‘Harmonia est discordia concors’: le modèle musical dans l’architecture des temps modernes”, C. Charraud (ed.), L’Harmonie, Orléans, Meaux, 2000, pp. 313-325.

M. L. Scalvini & S. Villari, Il manoscritto sulle proporzioni di François Bernin de Saint-Hilarion, Palermo, Aesthetica Preprint, 1994.

A. Serravezza & P. Gozza, Estetica ‘e’ musica. L’origine di un incontro, Bologna, CLUEB, 2004.

P. Vendrix, “Proportions harmoniques et proportions architecturales dans la théorie française des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles”, The International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 20, 1, 1989, pp. 3-10.

P. Vendrix, “L’augustinisme musical en France au XVIIe siècle”, Revue de Musicologie, 78, 2, 1992, pp. 237-255.

V. Zara, “Musica e Architettura tra Medio Evo e Età moderna. Storia critica di un’idea”, Acta Musicologica, 77, 1, 2005, pp. 1-26.

V. Zara, “Antichi e Moderni tra Musica e Architettura. All’origine della ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’ ”, Intersezioni, 26, 2, 2006, pp. 191-210.

V. Zara, “Suono e carattere della base attica. Itinerari semantici d’una metafora musicale nel linguaggio architettonico francese del Settecento”, Musica e Storia, 15, 2, 2007-2009, pp. 443-474.

V. Zara, “Dall’ ‘Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’ al Tempio di Salomone: modelli architettonico-musicali nell’ ‘Architecture Harmonique’ di René Ouvrard, 1679”, S. Frommel & F. Bardati (eds.), La réception de modèles cinquecenteschi dans l’art français du XVIIe siècle, Geneva, Droz, 2010, pp. 131-156.

V. Zara, “From Quantitative to Qualitative Architecture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A New Musical Perspective”, Nexus Network Journal, 13, 2, 2011, pp. 411-430.

V. Zara (ed.), R. Ouvrard, Architecture harmonique, ou application de la doctrine des proportions de la musique à l’architecture, Paris, Garnier, 2017.